The present invention generally relates to electronic apparatus and, in a preferred embodiment thereof, more particularly provides apparatus for compactly supporting in a housing structure a stacked array of horizontally removable disk drives or other types of electronic packages.
Horizontally extending series of hard disk drives are often mounted in a vertically stacked array in a metal housing structure which protects the disk drives and permits their removal for repair and replacement as necessary. It is considered desirable in this technology to place these supported disk drives in as compact an arrangement as possible to provide additional space for related electronic equipment.
To provide convenient access to the housing-supported disk drives, it has been a conventional practice to support each horizontally extending series of disks on the bottom wall of a tray which may be moved horizontally into and out of the housing. Using this conventional method of supporting and storing multiple disk drives, removal of a given drive requires that its associated tray be pulled horizontally outwardly to provide for subsequent vertical removal of the selected disk drive from its tray. This support configuration limits the practical height of the disk drive support housing since, if the top of the housing is too high, a technician may not be able to conveniently reach one of the uppermost disk drives and lift it out of its support tray without using a ladder, step stool or the like. Additionally, the weight of the disk drives in one or more upper trays which are opened may exert a sufficient tipping force on the housing that it could topple forward, thereby damaging disks and possibly injuring a person in front of the housing.
When supported disk drive arrays are provided with more and more compact storage arrangements, the provision of ample operational heat dissipation becomes an increasingly difficult design challenge. Additionally, with more disk drives per unit of housing disk storage volume, the problems of shock and vibration of the supported disk drive arrays in various directions correspondingly increases.
As can be seen from the foregoing, a need exists for improvements in apparatus for compactly supporting stacked arrays of disk drives or other types of electronic packages. It is to this need that the present invention is directed.